I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.

Although I have a child and I’m obviously interested in his idea, I was also interested in the simple bar chart depicting the leading causes of death in the USA. In the tiny Flash video, the text is unfortunately barely legible and I was interested in knowing where he got his data from.

The answer is really easy: the leading causes of death in the USA are compiled every year by the (American) National Center for Health Statistics and the results are available on their FastStats website. So, for 2007 (the latest results at the time of writing), the 15 leading causes of death in the USA are (ordered by decreasing number of cases):

Rank

Cause

Number

1.

Diseases of heart *

616,067

2.

Malignant neoplasms (cancers) *

562,875

3.

Cerebrovascular diseases *

135,952

4.

Chronic lower respiratory diseases

127,924

5.

Accidents (unintentional injuries)

123,706

6.

Alzheimer’s disease

74,632

7.

Diabetes mellitus *

71,382

8.

Influenza and pneumonia

52,717

9.

Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis

46,448

10.

Septicemia

34,828

11.

Intentional self-harm (suicide)

34,598

12.

Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis

29,165

13.

Essential hypertension and hypertensive renal disease

23,965

14.

Parkinson’s disease

20,058

15.

Assault (homicide)

18,361

The exact ICD-10 codes are in this report ; you can find their exact meaning here. Causes with an asterisk are related to food intake, according to Jamie Oliver.

Now you have the numbers, the origin of the data and the methodology used to collect these data. You can watch the presentation: